Conan the Invincible Part 20

From within his serpent-embroidered black robe he produced the things he needed for this simple task. A red chalk scribed a five-pointed star on the stone floor. From a pouch he poured a small mound of powder on each of the points. His left hand stretched forth, and from each fingertip a spark flew to flare the powders to blinding flame. Five thin streams of acrid red smoke rose toward the distant ceiling.

Amanar muttered words in a dead tongue, made a gesture with his left hand. The smoke was suddenly sucked back down onto the pentagram, swirling and billowing as if whipped by a great wind, yet confined to the fivepointed star. He spoke one further word, and with a sharp crack the smoke was gone. In its place was a hairless gray shape no higher than his knee. Vaguely ape-like in form, with sharply sloping forehead and knuckles brus.h.i.+ng the stone floor, its shoulders bore bony wings covered with taut gray hide.

The creature chattered at him, baring fangs that seemed to fill half its simian face, and sprang for the mage. At the boundary of the pentagram it suddenly shrieked, and was thrown back in a shower of sparks to crumple in the center of the star. Unsteadily it rose, claws clicking on the stone. The bat-like wings quivered as if for flight.

"Free!" it barked shrilly.

Amanar's lip curled in disgust and anger. He was far beyond dealing with these minor demons personally. That the girl had forced him to it was a humiliation he would a.s.suage personally, to her great discomfort.

"Free!" the demon demanded again.

"Be silent, Zath!" the necromancer commanded. The gray form recoiled, and Amanar allowed himself a small smile. "Yes, I know your name. Zath!

An you fail to do as I command, I'll use the power that gives me.

Others of your kind have from time to time annoyed me, and have found themselves trapped in material bodies. Bodies of solid gold." Amanar threw back his head and laughed.

The ape-like creature shuddered. Its dead-white eyes watched the sorcerer malevolently from beneath bony eyebrow ridges, but it said, "Zath do what?"

"These two," Amanar said, touching the images of Conan and Karela.

"Discover for me their names, and why they follow one of my Skim."

"How?" the demon shrilled.

"Play no games with me," Amanar snapped. "Think you I do not know? If you are close enough to an ordinary man to hear his speech, you can hear his thoughts as well. And you may as well stop trying me. You know it will not work."

The demon chattered his fangs angrily. "Zath goes." With a thunderous clap, it disappeared. A wind ruffled Amanar's robe as air rushed into the pentagram.

The sorcerer dusted his hands as though he had touched something demeaning, and turned back to the mirror. For a time the images rode on, then suddenly one of their number pointed aloft. Consternation swept across their faces. Crossbows were raised, bolts loosed at the sky.

A snap sounded in the chamber, and the apelike demon was back in the pentagram, flexing its wings and fondling a crossbow quarrel. "Try to kill Zath," it giggled, and added contemptuously, "With iron." The demon amused itself by poking the quarrel through its bony arm. The crossbow arrow left no wound.

"What of that which I sent you for?" Amanar demanded.

The demon glared at him a moment before speaking. "Big man named Conan.

Woman named Karela, called Red Hawk. They come for pendants, for girl.

Free!"

Amanar smiled at the images on the mirror, recovering now from their encounter with Zath and riding on. The lovely Velita's thief, and the famed Red Hawk at the same time, with her band. There were many uses to which such beings could be put.

"Ahead of these people," he said to the demon without taking his eyes from the mirror, "is one of my S'tarra. It is wounded, but yet lives.

You may feed. Now, go." The necromancer's smile was far from pleasant.

The slopes of the twisting valley steepened and grew bleaker as the bandits rode. Conan eyed a thornbush, of which there were even fewer here than had been along the trail earlier. It was stunted and bent as if something in air or soil distorted the dark branches into an unwholesome simulacrum of the plant it had once been. All the scrub growth they pa.s.sed grew more like that the further they went along the wounded snake-creature's trail.

"Fitting country," Hordo muttered just loud enough for Conan to hear.

His lone eye watched Karela warily, where she rode at the column's head. "First snake-men, then that flying Mitra-alone-knows-what."

"It didn't hurt anyone," Conan said flatly, "and it went away." He was not about to say anything that might dissuade the others from turning back, but at the same time he could not entirely dispel his own sense of unease.

"It was. .h.i.t," the one-eyed man went on. "Two bolts at least, but never a quiver out of it. 'Tis only luck the rest of these rogues didn't turn tail on the moment."

"Mayhap you should turn back, Hordo." He twisted in his saddle to peer down the line of mounted bandits straggled behind him on the winding Valley floor. Greed drove them forward, but since the strange creature was seen flying above them, seeming to follow them, every man watched the gray skies and stony slopes with sullen eyes. From time to time a man would touch his bandaged wounds and look thoughtfully back the way they had come.

Conan shook his black-maned head at the bearded brigand. "If she says she has decided to turn back, they'll follow her gratefully; if she pushes on, they'll begin dropping away one by one."

"You of all men should know she'll not turn from this trail. Not so long as you go on."

Conan was spared answering by a loud hail from Aberius. The weaselfaced bandit had been riding ahead of them to track the wounded snake-creature. Now he sat his horse where the trail wound around a rock spire ahead, waving his arm over his head.

"Halloo!"

Karela galloped forward without a word.

"I hope he's lost the track," Hordo muttered. Conan booted his horse ahead. After a moment the one-eyed man followed.

The red-haired woman turned her horse aside as Conan rode up. He looked at what Aberius had been showing her. The reptilian creature they had been following lay sprawled on its back, dead, in the shadow of the stone spire. Its chain mail had been torn off, and its chest ripped open.

"Scavengers have been at it already," Hordo muttered. "It's too bad the other one crawled off somewhere to die." He did not sound as if he thought it too bad at all.

"No vultures in the sky," Conan said thoughtfully. "And never have I heard of jackals that rip out a heart and leave the rest."

Aberius' horse whinnied as he jerked at the reins. "Mitra! The Cimmerian's right. Who knows what slew him? Perhaps that foul thing that flew over us and took no mind of crossbow bolts." His beady eyes darted wildly, as if expecting the apparition to appear again, from behind a rock.

"Be silent, fool!" Karela snapped. "It died of the wounds it took last night, and your approach frightened a badger or some such off its feeding."

"It makes no matter," Aberius said slyly. "I can track this carrion no further."

The woman's green-eyed gaze was contemptuously amused. "Then I've no more need of you, have I? I'll wager I can find where it was going myself."

"It's time to leave these accursed mountains." The pinch-faced man swiveled his head to the other bandits, waiting down the trail. Enough fear of the Red Hawk remained to keep them back from her council.

Karela did not deign to acknowledge his whine. "Since loosing its bow the creature has kept a straight line. When the twists of the land tools it aside, it found its way back again. We'll keep the same way."

"But-" Aberius swallowed the rest of his words as Hordo pushed his horse closer. Karela started ahead, ignoring them.

"An I hear any tales," the one-eyed man grated, "other than that you frighted some slinking vermin from this corpse, I'll see your cold carrion beside it." Conan caught his eye as he turned to follow Karela, and for a moment the bearded bandit looked abashed. "She needs one hound at least to remain faithful, Cimmerian. The way is forward, Aberius. Forward, you worthless rogues!" he bellowed. He met Conan's eyes again, then kicked his horse into a gallop.

For a time Conan sat his horse, watching the faces of the pa.s.sing brigands as they came in view of the b.l.o.o.d.y, scaled corpse. Each recoiled, muttering or with an oath, as he rounded the spire and got a clear look at what lay there, but the greed in their eyes was undiminished. They rode on.

Muttering his own oath, Conan spurred after Karela and Hordo.

Chapter XVII.

Haranides wearily raised his hand to signal a halt to the bedraggled column behind him. The site among the boulders at the face of the cliff had been a camp. An attempt had been made to hide the face, but a thin tendril of smoke still rose from ashes not covered well enough with dirt.

"Dismount the men, Aheranates," the captain commanded, wincing as he did so himself. A hillman's lance had left a gouge along his ribs that would be a long time in healing. "Take a party of ten and see if you can find which way they went without mucking up the tracks too badly."

The slender lieutenant Haranides could not help wondering how he had come through the fight without a scratch-touched his forehead stiffly in salute. "Sir." He sawed at his reins to pull his horse around and began telling off the men.